The Maple of Guyotplein

This sycamore grows on a square named for a man most Dutch schoolchildren have never heard of, Henri Daniel Guyot, a Walloon minister who founded the country's first school for deaf children in Groningen in 1790. The square itself started as the planted west side of the Ossenmarkt, given trees in 1754, and only took Guyot's name in 1890, on the centenary of his institute, by which point this specific tree, dated by the register to around 1890 to 1900, was likely just going into the ground. A monument to Guyot has stood on the square since 1829, decades before it carried his name, and the deaf institute itself operated here for generations before the building later became Groningen's courthouse. The sycamore has outlasted the institute's departure and watched the square's slow shift from an educational address to a judicial one. Sycamore sheds bark in flaking plates as it ages, closer to a plane tree's trunk than to most other maples, worth a look on this one after more than a century of growth. It stands in the open square, free, a short walk from the city's other historic squares.